This month’s best historical reads

By Lucy Worsley

Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow

Hodder & Stoughton, £25, hardback, 432 pages

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The endlessly enthusiastic historian and broadcaster Lucy Worsley turns her attention to Queen Victoria in her new book. Countless words have already been expended on the monarch, so Worsley takes a new approach to cracking the tough, seemingly dour façade: telling Victoria’s story through 24 key moments spread across her reign. They reveal both the changes she experienced through her life and the forces that emerged again and again: gender roles, royal tradition and social pressure. It’s a warm, humane look at a woman whose successes often masked her own deep unhappiness.

“Worsley tells Victoria’s story through 24 key moments spread across her reign”

BOOK OF THE MONTH

Victoria as a girl with her own mother, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, the Duchess of Kent

Victoria’s diaries give us an insight into the minutiae of her life

Victoria had nine children with Albert, the last, Beatrice, born in 1857; he died in 1861, leaving her the world’s most powerful single mother

MEET THE AUTHOR

Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, discusses Victoria’s great contradictions and why the longsuffering Queen doesn’t get as much credit as she deserves